Faithfulness, Not a Fix
My father taught me how to drive a car. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that my father sat by my side faithfully, through mistakes, through near-disaster, as I learned by experience how to drive a car.
I remember first practicing in an empty parking lot at Godwin. No problems there. I cruised around the perimeter. I practiced parking. I felt rather accomplished for a beginner. I could do this. Then my dad and I swapped seats, and he drove down Patterson to the entrance of West Creek. It was a Saturday morning, and there was hardly any traffic on the road. The speed limit was 35, I think. My dad pulled over, and we switched seats.
Suddenly that feeling of accomplishment faded. There on the open road, everything changed. Thirty-five felt like 80. Each car that passed me felt like a wreck waiting to happen. As my knuckles turned white on the steering wheel, I looked for the nearest place to pull over. I tried to give the wheel back to my dad. He said he’d be happy to take it, if that’s what I really wanted. But he also said, “Jonathan, I can’t do this for you. If I take the wheel from you now, you’ll never learn. Driving is difficult at first, and you’ll probably make some more mistakes. But that’s how you learn. And I’ll be here beside you the whole time.”
This is perhaps the greatest lesson I’ve learned from my dad. Not how to drive a car. Not that we learn from experience. Rather, how to sit with someone. What I have learned is that most of the time there is nothing I can do to fix someone else’s difficulty or mistake. But I can almost always be a faithful companion. And perhaps that is what is needed most anyway. Faithfulness, not a fix. (Most quick fixes are illusions, after all. Real change and growth take time and hard work.)
Recently I heard the story of a young baseball player who through injury had become addicted to opioids. His parents saw his life spiraling out of control, and there was nothing they could do to fix it. They could not force him to stop taking his drug. But they were relentless in expressing their care and concern, and when he finally hit bottom…he was not alone. They were there to pick him up and walk with him on the way of recovery.[1]
Saul’s Transformation
Last week when Israel asked for a king, God made it clear what they were really doing: rejecting God as king (1 Sam 8:7). But as they had already made up their mind and would not take no for an answer (1 Sam 8:19-20), God directs Samuel to anoint Saul as the new king. We cannot know for certain why God chooses Saul, but he has several qualities that may have recommended him. To begin, he is described as the most handsome man in Israel and also the tallest (1 Sam 9:2). We can imagine, then, that his appearance would have commanded both admiration and respect. But his soul also seems well suited for leadership. It is often said that the best leaders are the ones who don’t want to lead in the first place. This characterization fits Saul perfectly. When we first meet him, he is a modest, sensitive soul, worried about being away from his father for too long and apprehensive when the famous prophet Samuel begins to show him special attention (1 Sam 9:5, 21). Perhaps most telling of all, there are actually three separate coronation ceremonies for Saul (1 Sam 9:27-10:1; 10:20-24; 11:14-15), as if to suggest that the first two don’t quite take. Indeed, in one of those ceremonies, he must be literally dragged out from hiding to receive the honor of his kingship (1 Sam 10:20-24).
Why, then, does God reject Saul as king at the start of today’s scripture (1 Sam 16:1)? In short, he has changed dramatically, and for the worse. The formerly sheepish, guileless boy has grown into a paranoid, power-obsessed king, willing to do anything to preserve his position, even disobey God (1 Sam 15:17-23), even exploit his daughter’s love to entrap and kill his own rival, who is her beloved (1 Sam 18:20-30). Saul’ s radical transformation hints at the corrosive effects of power. Even the most innocent soul is not immune.[2] Samuel’s original warning that a king would take and take and take—in other words, would live more for himself than for God and others—has come true at the first time of asking, and with a person who initially seemed so uninterested with the power given to him.
Israel Is Not Left to Their Own Devices
Very rarely does the Old Testament give us a glimpse into God’s inner life, telling us how God actually feels about something. So when we do learn how God feels about something, we know it’s important. When we learn at the start of today’s scripture that “the Lord was sorry that he had made Saul king over Israel” (1 Sam 15:35), we might be led to wonder, “Did God not know what would happen?” Rather than dive down the rabbit-hole of whether God is omniscient, I’d say let’s just follow the text. The suggestion is simply that God had high hopes for Saul and was disappointed. What is remarkable to me is that God would have high hopes for anybody considering God’s initial opposition to Israel having a king at all. In Samuel’s initial warning to Israel, he suggests that God is going to leave Israel to their own devices, that when they cry out, God will not answer (1 Sam 8:18). Yet God’s sorrow for having made Saul king suggests that, far from having left Israel to their own devices, God has actually stayed close beside Israel and hoped that the situation, if not ideal, if indeed a grave mistake, would still lead to something good, some change and growth.
Furthermore, how God responds to God’s sorrow seems to confirm God’s faithfulness—that God is in this together with Israel. Today’s passage is a familiar one, and I don’t intend to belabor its most obvious point, of which I’m sure you’re well aware, namely that God looks not as humans do on the outward appearance but on the heart (1 Sam 16:7). The conventional interpretation of today’s passage is that God is fixing things, replacing a bad king with a good king (never mind why God chose the bad king in the first place…). What I would like to suggest, however, is that today’s passage is not a fix but rather a show of God’s faithfulness. It’s not God correcting a mistake. It’s God still caring for the people who have rejected God as king. It’s God choosing to work within the limits of Israel’s own choices and mistakes, rather than abandoning them completely to the consequences. Come to think of it, it’s a little bit like a father (or mother) who cannot fix their child’s difficulty or mistake but who can nevertheless choose to sit beside them. To be faithful in their presence and care.
The very same faithfulness that we see from God in today’s scripture, will continue and eventually take on flesh in Jesus. A son of David. Jesus is not a fix. Jesus is God’s faithfulness, God with us, God by our side, teaching us, showing us, bearing with us, as we change and grow ever more into his likeness, which is in fact our original likeness to God our creator.
“The Love of Christ Urges Us On”
I would like to think of God’s faithfulness to Israel as a slow but steady process. Israel’s kings, even David, are not always faithful. But God is. I like the way Zechariah, the father of John the Baptizer, puts it in Luke, as he reflects on God’s faithfulness through the years. He says it is like a sunrise, a dawning. In the darkness, the sky begins to blush and brighten, and eventually the sun peeks over the horizon and “the dawn from on high [finally breaks] upon us” in a brilliant light, which is the light of Christ (Luke 1:78).
It is a dawning that happens in our own lives. It is as the desert father Poemen said: God is tender and yielding, like water. And we are like stone. At a glance, the water seems powerless against the stone. And yet, over time, it is water that powerfully molds and reshapes stone.[3] It is not a quick fix. It is a slow but sure faithfulness, always with us, inviting our change and growth.
In today’s New Testament scripture, Paul explains our
transformation in terms of love. Love is the water on the stone. “The love of
Christ urges us on,” he writes (2 Cor 5:14), and this love changes everything.
“In Christ, new creation!” is how he literally puts it (2 Cor 5:17). It is not
so much that Christ has taken the wheel from us, as that Christ has sat by our
side and loved us, through our wrecks and wrong turns, and we finally begin to
choose for ourselves his love, this way of living not for ourselves but
for God and others. It is indeed like a whole new world, a “new creation.”
In this sense, we can see the faint outlines of Christ in 1 Samuel, as God remains faithful to Israel even through their rejection of God and their ill-fated foray into the tournament of nations. God’s faithfulness is oriented—then as now—around the hope that we will learn and change and grow, that we will become more like our Father in heaven, more our true selves. If I had to put the gospel of God’s faithfulness in a nutshell, I would say it like this. God stays with us, so that we might stay with others. Because the quick fix is an illusion. Real change and growth take time and work—and most importantly, a love that stays by our side, working on us like water on stone.
Prayer
Who does not abandon us to our own choices and mistakes,
May your patient love rub off on us,
Scrubbing off from us
The detritus of judgment and resentment, fear and shame,
To reveal your image
…
So that we might likewise be faithful with others
And share with them the joy of your new creation.
In Christ, whose love urges us on: Amen.
[1] Eric Huffman, “Are We All
Getting High (Part Two),” https://www.maybegodpod.com/are-we-all-getting-high-part-two,
accessed June 9, 2024.
[2] This interpretation of Saul
was greatly aided by the interpretation of Moshe Halbertal and Stephen Holmes
provided in their book: The Beginning of Politics: Power in the Book of
Samuel (Princeton: Princeton, 2017), 20-23.
[3] The Desert Christian: Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection (trans. Benedicta Ward; New York: MacMillan, 1975), 192.
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